Gender Differences In Lord Of The Flies Gender Roles Essay

Lady of the Flies While reading any novel, watching any movie, or generally just enjoying any sort of story no matter what type of media it is conveyed through, the listener may often ask questions of what could have been. That is to say that they ask themselves what new or different direction the story might go through if one or more certain qualities of the story were to be changed or reversed. One common question, or trope, that comes up is if what if the genders of the main characters were changed from boy to girl, or vice versa? In a novel like Lord of the Flies by William Golding, which contains an all male schoolboy cast, this is bound to be asked. The reader inquires to themselves how, if at all, would the events of the novel change? Would there be as much death and chaos as there was in the original story? I think that if it had been schoolgirls instead of schoolboys that landed on a deserted island, there would be much less violence and disputes among the group.

For one point, if one takes into consideration the time period the novel is set in, which is around the dawn of World War II, he or she should also take under consideration the major social gender differences that existed at the time. Back then and even today occasionally on a slightly more subtle scale, the way parents would raise their sons is different from the way that they would have raised their daughters. I think that there would still be the same type of cruelty present as there was with the boys, albeit maybe on a different level and size. For example, in the first chapter when Ralph called Piggy by his unwanted nickname and made him be stuck with it for the rest of the book, I think this is very likely to happen if the genders were